Bøker av Joseph Luzzi

Some five hundred years ago, Sandro Botticelli, a painter of humble origin, created works of unearthly beauty. A star of Florence's art world, he was commissioned by a member of the city's powerful Medici family to execute a near-impossible project: to illustrate all one hundred cantos of The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri, the ultimate visual homage to that "divine" poet.This sparked a gripping encounter between poet and artist, between the religious and the secular, between the earthly and the evanescent, recorded in exquisite drawings by Botticelli that now enchant audiences worldwide. Yet after a lifetime of creating masterpieces including Primavera and The Birth of Venus, Botticelli declined into poverty and obscurity. His Dante project remained unfinished. Then the drawings vanished for over four hundred years. The once famous Botticelli himself was forgotten.The nineteenth-century rediscovery of Botticelli's Dante drawings brought scholars and art lovers to their knees: this work embodied everything the Renaissance had come to mean. From Botticelli's metaphorical rise from the dead in Victorian England to the emergence of eagle-eyed connoisseurs like Bernard Berenson and Herbert Horne in the early twentieth century, and even the rescue of precious art during the Second World War and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the posthumous story of Botticelli's Dante drawings is, if anything, even more dramatic than their creation.A combination of artistic detective story and rich intellectual history, shows not only how the Renaissance came to life, but also how Botticelli's art helped bring it about-and, most important, why we need the Renaissance and all that it stands for today.

The child of Italian immigrants and an award-winning scholar of Italian literature, the author straddles these two perspectives to link his family's dramatic story to Italy's north-south divide, its quest for a unifying language, and its passion for art, food, and family.

A story of love and grief. 'I became a widower and a father on the same day' says Joseph Luzzi. His book tells how Dante's 'The Divine Comedy' helped him to endure his grief, raise their infant daughter, and rediscover love. Where do we turn when we lose everything?In 2007, Joseph Luzzi's wife Katherine was eight-and-a-halfmonths pregnant when she was involved in a fatal car accident.Their daughter, Isabel, was delivered by emergency C-sectionand somehow survived, even while her mother could not. Inthe days when his life changed irrevocably and the years of heartache that followed, Luzzi turned to a man who had beenan unassuming part of his life since college: Dante. A memoir of grief and healing divided into three parts, the book trace's Luzzi's journey through Dante's 'The Divine Comedy'and his journey through a world without Katherine. The first part, "e;The Underworld,"e; follows Luzzi's descent into grief and his examination of Dante's accounts of early exile. In the second, "e;Purgatorio"e;, Luzzi explores how Dante found the will to carry on and how he himself began to find hidden opportunities in everyday life. The last part is called "e;Squaring the Circle,"e;referring to Dante's metaphor for coming face-to-facewith God and the mysteries of love; in it, Luzzi shares his gratitude towards family members who set aside their lives in his time of need, as well as his experience of meeting the woman who would become his wife and mother to his daughter. Luzzi tells his story of personal loss and digs deeper into Dante almost simultaneously, allowing the poet to guide his thinking and forging connections between life in the Inferno and the long life of grief. His memoir is both a personal odyssey and a reminder of the power of great literature in the darkest of times.

Brings Italian film studies into dialogue with fields outside its usual purview by showing how films can contribute to our understanding of aesthetic questions that stretch back to Homer.